ABSTRACT
The real crime here, Wollstonecraft is careful to emphasize, is that attention to ‘the frippery of dress’ weakens the mind, and distracts it from social duty. These women deprive the poor of employment, and themselves of the leisure necessary to self-improvement, for, she writes, they ‘work only to dress better than they could otherwise afford’ (75). But the most remarkable feature of this characterization must be that suggestion that the absorption in self-adornment, in the almost unmentionable folly of shopping and bargain hunting, is more contemptible and degrading than the behaviour of the sexually voracious woman, who at least has ‘something more in view’.
